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Ahem! As I was trying to say, I've been watching Guild Wars 2 for quite some time, and I'm very excited to get the chance to try it out tomorrow, as well as to meet some of the dev staff (no, not devil staff stupid autocorrect!). Anybody who doesn't know much about the game should go check the official site. It's very different from Guild Wars, though it takes place in the same world 200 years later.

I'll be posting my bloggy impressions here when I get the chance, and I'll have a full impression up next week. I hope to be able to take some video as well. In the meantime, I'm enjoying rainy Seattle from the vantage point of not-outside.

Stupid time zones. It's 5am, but it feels like 8am to me. Anyway, last night we got a basic introduction to the event and had time to socialize with some of the staff and our fellow game journos. I even hung out with my RPGFan counterpart... Don't tell!

It's never hard to tell when people sincerely enjoy working with each other, and that's certainly the case with the ANet staff. We picked the brain of the producer at dinner, then I chatted with several of the staffers afterwards. We ended up chatting about our exploits in other MMOs, and it was fun to see the different things the development team enjoyed about the genre and how those experiences contributed to Guild Wars 2... Even the guy who likes messing with other people in MMOs got to contribute by telling everyone how he'd be a jerk so they could design systems that didn't promote jerkery.

This morning we had a tour of ArenaNet, which is a very nice studio space full of Guild Wars 2 art and silly doodles on the walls. All the desks there are on wheels so if people are working on a project together, they can sit next to each other. Pretty neat!

After that, we played around in the human starting area for a while. It's a very bucolic kind of place, but after some time rousing fires in hay bales and checking fishing traps, I followed my personal story into the city and got into quite the bar brawl. Fighting in close quarters is challenging for a thief with a pistol, so I was proud when I completed that segment without dying. I'm getting the hang of when to dodge most effectively, but it's harder than it looks.

I cut my gameplay short in order to have a few minutes talking to Jeff Grubb, one of the lead lore guys for the game (Not to mention his past making the Forgotten Realms. I got to ask him my nerdy lore questions, so that was awesome.

GW2 is far easier to get into than GW, though MMO vets will need to abandon some old habits, and there are a couple important game mechanics like dodging that the game could introduce better. I suspect some of that will be fixed by launch from conversing with the devs.

You have to pay for the box, but after that there is no sub fee. Continued development will be supported by a convenience and vanity item cash shop.

Aaaaand now that I have access to the Internet again, I can finish up this blog. I actually had the most fun of the day playing world vs. world vs. world, much to my own surprise. We journos and a few devs teamed up against the QA team, and one of the systems designers showed us the ropes. It was pretty neat to be able to hold my own against the QA guys with only the skills I'd unlocked in the first 4 levels of the game... I'm sure I'd be more effective with a full skill load-out, but I did pretty well, considering. You can jump into PvP at any point in the game and it boosts everyone to 80 for the purposes of skill and equipment power (and there's no post-80 equipment power grind, special sets just look cool after that).

Anyway, I got to storm some keeps and run a few siege weapons. I didn't get to drive a siege golem, but I found them very useful to hide behind while shooting melee dudes with a pistol. ;)

After PvP, we got to play around in the human starter area for a while until it was time to go. Had dinner with Jeff Grubb and studio head Mike O'Brian seated at our table, so we all got to talk about Guild Wars 2 and other various nerdy topics.

There was one more day of optional Guild Wars 2 gameplay, but my plane was scheduled too early for me to make it. That's ok, because all pre-purchasers will get to play the game next weekend. Yay!